The photolithography technique has been employed as a formation and processing method of a device having a fine structure used in a wide range of fields of art including a semiconductor device, a circuit board and the like. In these fields of art, reduction of size, increase of integration degree and increase of speed of a semiconductor device considerably proceed associated with the highly sophisticated demands on capabilities, which bring about continuous miniaturization and increase of aspect ratio of the resist pattern used for photolithography. However, the progress of miniaturization of the resist pattern causes pattern collapse as a major problem.
It has been known that upon drying a resist pattern from a processing liquid used in wet processing (which is mainly a rinsing treatment for washing away the developer solution) after developing the resist pattern, the collapse of the resist pattern is caused by the stress derived by the surface tension of the processing liquid. For preventing the collapse of the resist pattern, such methods have been proposed as a method of replacing the rinsing liquid by a liquid having a low surface tension using a nonionic surfactant, a compound soluble in an alcohol solvent, or the like (see, for example, Patent Documents 1 and 2), and a method of hydrophobizing the surface of the resist pattern (see, for example, Patent Document 3).
In a fine structure formed of a metal, a metal nitride, a metal oxide or the like (which may be hereinafter referred to as a “fine metal structure”, and a metal, a metal nitride, a metal oxide or the like may be hereinafter referred totally as a “metal”) by the photolithography technique, the strength of the metal itself constituting the structure is larger than the strength of the resist pattern itself or the bonding strength between the resist pattern and the substrate, and therefore, the collapse of the structure pattern is hard to occur as compared to the resist pattern. However, associated with the progress of reduction of size, increase of integration degree and increase of speed of a semiconductor device and a micromachine, the pattern collapse of the structure is becoming a major problem due to miniaturization and increase of aspect ratio of the resist pattern. The fine metal structure has a surface state that is totally different from that of the resist pattern, which is an organic material, and therefore, there is no effective measure for preventing the pattern collapse of the structure. Accordingly, the current situation is that the degree of freedom on designing the pattern for producing a semiconductor device or a micromachine with reduced size, increased integration degree and increased speed is considerably impaired since the pattern is necessarily designed for preventing the pattern collapse.